One Soul: Needfully Patched
by indiachick
Summary: One shot. Death builds the Great Wall of Sam, but it is not an easy hand-waving spell. He needs to get through the landscape of traumatized Sam's mind first. There's Lucifer, and Dean, and so many various versions of Sam himself. Please review :)


_Warnings: vaguish Lucifer/Sam, suicide_

_Rating: PG 13_

_Prompt: Written for the ohsam comment-fic meme, for omh_6's awesome prompt: "While Death is building the Great Wall of Sam, he tries to fix as much of the hell trauma as he can. Sam's head is one messy place though."_

**_A/N: Please review if you enjoyed the story? It would mean a lot :)_**

* * *

"Wow. It's like Building Blocks gone wild, Dean," Sam says, and really- he knows Dean isn't around or anything but don't judge him, okay? He always liked imaginary friends. You'd like one too, if you were stuck in a Cage with the Devil, _the _Angel, and a silent half-brother for company.

He's leaning over the edge of the world and below him are the entrails of the city that Lucifer keeps building and taking down. It's made of glass buttons and feathers and fire-forged beads and thumbtacks, and every building is at least seventy floors high. There's an ebony chapel strung together from crossed-out verses and a river full of doll heads, and everything is melted together so that the whole city holds. Once upon a time, one or two of Sam's bones made it down there regularly too, but since his body disappeared, so have those.

He counts all his 206 phantom bones everyday so he can be sure that all of the real ones made it out of here.

Spatially, Dante Alighieri is right and the Cage is the last pit-stop on the Hell tour if you start from the top and make your way down, like you do with ice-cream cones. When there is wind, the heat of the world above will melt the ice floor of the Cage and then un-melt it into new and exciting shapes. Adam, who still has a body, gets mired in the glassy bluish-greenish-blackish ice. Sam with his haunted imaginary bones never really gets stuck.

It annoyed Lucifer when it first happened, so now he keeps devising experiments for the new Sam character. Apparently the new Sam character can fall onto knives and be poked with needles, it is flammable and not impervious to garden shears, and it will _both_ scream when torn open _and _stitch itself back together, which is a marked improvement from the first version. The new Sam character screams exactly like the old one, but Lucifer doesn't seem very convinced, so every experiment repeats a million times.

"Sometimes there's pink snow," Sam tells imaginary Dean.

It falls from the world above and burns his tongue to ashes and tastes of arsenic and strawberries.

* * *

At first Death is an old man.

Then he's a really big person on a really big white horse and he has a sickle and he's waving it at a furious Lucifer. Sam knows when he's furious because he turns into a dragon, but ironically not one with wings—(what's that called again, a lindworm?)—and he goes shrieking in Enochian so loudly that it shatters Sam and Adam into little skittering pieces that go scattering over the ice.

Usually it takes a while to put himself back together again, it's a lot of work because he's not very good at jigsaw puzzles, but this time the pale horse comes over and whinnies and nudges the Sam-pieces together and Sam swears he'll get it a carrot if he can; it deserves all the carrots in the world.

He wonders if it isn't really a horse but a stag, because it seems to have branching antlers, and there's one serene white candle in each branch, lambent like a lullaby.

"You're the sixty-fourth Sam," it says, and it turns him into a candle, and puts him on its branch.

* * *

Death finds the sixty-fifth Sam on a snow-white beach.

The stars are little cutouts with heaven's light shining through them, the ships are in the distance with their bright lights and loud horns, and the seagulls flit over the surface of the ocean.

Sam and Dean are watching a school of tiny fish. They're bright in the lights, pink and gold and silver, electric-bright like Christmas lights. They swim around Dean's feet. He laughs and yells, "Look, Sammy, disco-fish!"

Death nearly walks away, but the horse lingers. They watch while Dean turns to Lucifer in a hearbeat-deathbeat. Sam falls back and goes in the water with a splash and the fish all disappear and the stars are all gone.

"Oh," he says in a small voice and closes his ears as Lucifer sits by him, taunting and singing, telling him stories. _Dean's happy you're gone._ _You were always walking right towards me. We are forever, Sammy. Be still._

Lucifer puts his hand in Sam's hair and twists his head towards him, and the crowing, memory-eating things that the Devil spins out of thin air eats through his hazel eyes and into the crimson place where all his thoughts spool out, until Sam is smiling and believing and knows nothing.

"Sixty-five," says Death, and wonders how many more pieces are left.

* * *

Some are easier to find than the rest. Some don't go hiding in the tiny corners, the bone-marrow dark where nothing will reach, the bottom of the ocean that the sun never sees.

They're scattered all over, and there's this one Sam who's so far in the past that Death nearly misses him, twelve and on the backseat of the Impala with Lucifer leaning over him with iron thread and a needle.

"You're so full of theatrics," Death says to the imagined Lucifer, disapprovingly.

Death plucks two more from Sam's long ago memories, and one from his year with Ruby.

There's one meandering Sam— _seventy-two_, Death tallies—in a railway station.

* * *

The seventy-second Sam's train of thoughts all get shipwrecked, and the ship has the words _HMS Montana_ written on the starboard side. He doesn't know why those specific words, and he would ask imaginary Dean but imaginary Dean keeps climbing into one of the trains and getting shipwrecked. He's like Kenny. Sam says, "You bastards," like a chant every time Dean shipwrecks.

It's sort of funny but also terribly sad.

He goes shapeless and puddles on the floor whenever it happens, right after the "You bastards," and it's like a little ritual.

_Sorry, Dean_, he thinks. _Sorry._

"Sam," says Death, but Sam is watching the trains and pays no attention to him.

He watches a train pass by and there's Jessica in it, her face pressed to the window, and Brady, and his parents. And that girl with dark hair and lycanthropic eyes is probably Madison, and the grinning man with the mane of hair is probably Ash. They all wave at him before hitting the ship and going up in flames. Sam goes up in flames too, but Death pokes him with his walking stick and says, "You're not in the Cage anymore."

Which is confusing, because everything is the Cage. Where else could it be? Sam's looking for Lucifer but he can't find him, and that frightens him. He could be anywhere. Everywhere.

"I'm going to build a Wall in your mind, keep the memories of hell at bay," says Death, and Sam laughs, imagining a giant brick wall running all over his soul, built up section by section until nothing of him is left.

"Good luck with that," he says, and walks into the path of the next train, and Death sips at his coffee and watches while the horse puts him together and spins him into wax.

* * *

The arrogant robotic one refuses to turn into a candle.

"I'm not entirely here yet, and you can't make me."

"Fine," Death says. "But leave this forest and you're done for."

Sam sneers. "You know he'll come looking for me. Me and all the others. He's me. I_ know _him."

This one is smart, Death has to give him that. He hopes Dean is smarter.

* * *

Hell-Sam numbers one to thirty-three are really one person, the bigger chunk of that part of the soul that managed to stay together. He's back at Bobby Singer's house, an imagined version of it at least, and he looks up from the kitchen table when Death comes back.

"Have you got all of them?" he whispers.

Death looks at him, this last, broken-down Sam: his blood-rust coated clothes and the endlessness of his eyes.

The pale horse neighs and with a wave of his hand, Death places all the candles around the room.

"What about you?"

"I must stay. When the time comes, I must be here to warn."

Death nods and turns away. He knows Sam Winchester will be here some day. Some things are tenuous, some bridges easily broken, some places predestined for some shoes to walk. The room of candles is somewhere Sam will be before his shoes are finally worn down. Perhaps in ten years, or twenty, or in three minutes. Time is not of importance; it is foreordained.

"If he can't take it, if there's no other way out, you'll be there?" asks Sam.

The pale horse trots to him and Sam puts a hand up to touch the top of its head. It whinnies, and then turns to go back to its rider.

"Don't forget to brick the door on your way out," says Sam, sighing.

* * *

Patched up souls are bright and blue just like any other. You'd never know how much work they are by just looking at them. By all lexical imports of the word: Death is an artist.

"I'm going to put up a wall in your head, Sam," Death says, to the struggling young man on the bed. "Don't scratch."


End file.
